Wednesday, December 30, 2009

First Snow


We’d planned a hike yesterday, but the day was so cold that instead we drove an hour with cousins, one uncle, and two aunts, up to Portland to visit the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

The first flakes started falling some time between 1:00 and 2:00, and a dozen children rushed out the museum exits to leap and rejoice and catch snowflakes while adults watched from the museum windows. I for one was much more interested in watching the snow come down over the Willamette River than I was in learning how electricity works. Fortunately, the museum has lovely large windows.

By the time we left at 4:00 p.m., the snow was sticking, with a couple of inches on the ground. My girls and their cousins built two-thirds of a snowman on the sidewalk in front of the museum before we insisted they climb into the cars for the hour-long ride home to Newberg.

An hour later we had driven a dozen city blocks through stop-start traffic and hadn’t yet made it to a freeway onramp. Driving wasn’t treacherous, just slow. Todd and his brother Jeff grew up in Indiana, where snowy roads are the norm. We made a bathroom stop and decided to have dinner before making our way to the bridge that would take us over the river and onto the freeway home.

It’s a good thing we ate when we did, because once we got onto the freeway it took us four more hours to drive down to Newberg—usually an hour’s drive, tops.

We found ways to pass the time. When my ten-year-old nephew—son of Todd’s eldest brother—asked Todd to turn up the car stereo and play “something hard,” Todd gave him a choice: Rush, Kansas, or Yes. What ten-year-old knows these bands? The ten-year-old raised by the same man who introduced Todd to these bands thirty years ago, that’s who! “I want Yes!” my nephew shouted enthusiastically.

So we rocked out, cruising the icy freeway at a couple of miles an hour, top speed. When we’d been on the road three hours and were still not quite halfway home, my sister-in-law began to sing, “One thousand barrels of beer on the wall, one thousand barrels of beer … ”

We were warm. Plenty of gas. Todd knows how to drive in wintry conditions, so we weren’t stressed. But it was a long trip and hard for the kids to sit still and not to pick at each other. All of us were relieved to make the final turn into our driveway at 10:00 p.m.—nearly six hours after we left OMSI.

That first hour, when we drove just a few blocks, car length by car length, Todd rolled down his window and gathered a handful of snow from the car roof.

“What are you doing?” I protested. “That’s not safe, Todd.”

He packed the snow, patting it back and forth between his palms as any boy raised in the Midwest knows to do. Then he chucked it at the car ahead of us, the car his brother was driving, with our two older daughters and our niece in the back seat. Todd reached up to gather another handful of snow before he answered me.

“I want them to remember this,” Todd said as he packed the snow into a firm ball. “I want them to tell my grandkids about this day.”

We’ll have to wait another ten or twenty years to know for sure, but I suspect that Todd shaped our girls’ memories of their first snow in Oregon as purposefully and firmly as he packed those snowballs.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Full Circle

During my junior year of college I thought I would need to leave school in order to pay the rent. Before withdrawing from classes, I applied for one more job on campus. A friend had mentioned an opening at the English Language Institute, where international students came to study English before going on to university studies. I walked into the ELI, asked about the job, and was led to a back room for an interview on the spot.

The man interviewing me was somewhat famous on campus. His name was up on posters everywhere, as he was always recruiting native English speakers to be paired with his international students for conversation practice. I’d meant to volunteer but hadn’t gotten around to it. Now I was interviewing to be his assistant.

So I thought. It became clear during the course of the interview that the director was moving out of state and I was interviewing for his position. The job offer came a few days later—unexpected, unbelievable. I finished college because of that job and continued working at the ELI after graduation, right up until I went to Damascus (where I met Todd) and became an international student myself.

When Todd and I married, we moved to Philadelphia with $300 cash and a tiny U-Haul trailer packed with books and a futon. We had an apartment and a promise from Todd’s grandmother to pay seminary tuition, but no jobs. I walked into Drexel University’s English Language Center and walked out with a job. Unfortunately, the job was part-time and just barely supported us. A few months later I interviewed for an office job, working for a Christian radio broadcast. My new boss at the radio broadcast saw writing and editing talent I didn’t even know I had. Thanks, Diana!

Back to the full circle thing. Last summer our girls were part of a drama camp during our first weeks in Newberg, and at the closing picnic I met another parent who works at the English Language Institute at George Fox University. I told him I’d once worked in ESL, and he encouraged me to drop by the ELI once the fall semester was under way so he could introduce me to folks there. Things didn’t come together for the fall semester, but last week I was offered a part-time course load teaching speech (my bachelor’s degree is in speech communications) and a few writing tutorials for ESL students. For the first time since I left the radio broadcast sixteen years ago (and not counting freelance work), I have a job!

I’ll keep up my own writing. I’ll continue freelancing with editing and critique on projects I really love. As I look at the blinking lights on our Christmas tree and the gifts loaded beneath it, I’m thinking about how excited I am to unwrap this neat package that has been placed before me: a convergence of employment doing what I enjoy. Merry Christmas, folks.

Thursday, December 17, 2009

The Night in Question


While ironing shirts, I listened to Tobias Wolff reading his short story, “Bullet in the Brain.” When the titular shot was fired I put down the iron and sat on the side of the bed, so riveted by Wolff’s words and images I couldn’t do anything but listen. Then it ended, perfectly.

Wow.


A normal person would at this point breathe a deep sigh of satisfaction, stand, spritz a sleeve, and resume ironing. But I’m not a normal person. I’m a writer.

I had to know how Wolff slowed time, how he revealed character by exclusion, how by the end of the story he made me care so much. To understand his crafting, I would have to see the words on the page. I opened my laptop and clicked to our library’s website to put in a request for The Night in Question, Wolff’s story collection containing “Bullet in the Brain.” Only then was I able to finish my ironing.

Yesterday I dropped by the library with my two younger daughters in tow. From behind the counter the librarian located my request on the hold shelf and pulled out the book. I could see that it was the size and shape of a book you might buy off a spinning book display. Odd, I thought. Maybe they’re marketing literary fiction for the popular market now. The librarian handed me the book and I slipped it into my purse, collected my daughters from the children’s room, and left.

This morning I took the book out of my purse. Something wasn’t right. It wasn’t by Tobias Wolff, for one thing. The title was correct, but the cover image of a windblown couple jolted me. Across the top of the book in serif all caps I read: HARLEQUIN.

"Max Ross spoke coldly, but the flash of heat that seared through his eyes told her he heard her plea."

I took the book back this afternoon, and a chuckling librarian said she’d tell the library where the book originated that their Harlequin is listed incorrectly in the database. “We don’t even stock Harlequins at this library,” she said. We’re classy here in Newberg, I guess. She filed a new request for The Night in Question, but she said chances are good that this same Harlequin title will boomerang right back to me. My very own drama taken straight from the theater of the absurd.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Rain Returns


My weeks-long absence from the blog is directly related to a weeks-long spell of beautiful clear weather here in western Oregon.

When Thanksgiving weekend came and it wasn’t raining, we decided to go ahead and cut down our Christmas tree—quickly, before it starts raining again! Day after dry day we waited for the clouds to take hold and the rain to fall. We’ve had gorgeous dry weather (and a decorated Christmas tree) for nearly three weeks now.

Today the rain is back, tapping on the skylight, glossing the deck, clinging to the bare aspen branches then falling from them like slow tears. It’s midmorning as I write this, but dark enough that our Christmas tree lights look merry, and in their dim light I cannot see the plentitude of needles I know are sprinkled over and around the wrapped gifts.

Autumn’s nearly over and I never did get my extended, dreary, Gothic season. Not that I’m complaining. It’s nice to have expectations turned upside down sometimes. It is, after all, a season for surprises.